Here are some of the languages I am learning or shall learn.
I’d like to read German literature and visit Germany someday. Besides, I associate it with fond memories of my old school. My German class’ teacher grew up in Germany, and she’d tell this young American audience all about the country — how they had a shopping street called Der Zeil, were blunt but loyal friends, earned money for recycling, ate white asparagus, made politically satirical parade floats for Karneval, and so on.
I’d like to read Roman literature — Virgil, Juvenal, the works. I also find the sound and grammar beautiful.
Latin is such a beautiful language, but among the most useless I know; the only real reason to learn it is to read poems and plays by a handful of people who have been dead for hundreds or thousands of years. Some people also say they learn Latin to help them study law, medicine, or English etymology, which I personally don’t consider a strong reason for torturing yourself with the passive periphrastic or the dozens of verb endings. Finding people offline who know the language is almost impossible outside of academic settings; I have never had a real-life conversation in it. There are also very few websites, YouTube channels, music, or modern books in Latin.
Almost all of my interests align with the strong suits of Russian culture – literature, classical music, art, ice-skating, ballet, and physics. I also happen to think Russian is the most beautiful language. I like the Slavic languages generally, but unlike the other ones, Russian’s spoken by many people.
Russian cursive isn’t as hard as people say it is, and you can get used to the grammar and the prefixes of verbs of motion with good textbooks (I recommend this) and practice. The most difficult part in the long term seems to be memorizing different verbs’ conjugations.
It is an abundant language in terms of resources. There are tons of YouTube channels and Quizlet/Anki decks you can use and large social media platforms exclusively using the language. Its yields are very rich, too — at this point, I don’t even engage with its music and poetry to learn, just to enjoy them because they’re good. Even if you never meet Russian speakers, it may help you understand Serbian, Ukrainian, Polish, and so on (though learning Interslavic is better for that purpose.)
I have heard stories online of people recieving comments about “supporting imperialism/the war” when they say they’re learning Russian. In my experience, though, pretty much everyone offline is normal about it. If anything, though, learning Russian may help in antiwar efforts — I know Ukrainian refugees that don’t speak a speck of English and need stuff translated into Russian, and if anything, I regret not learning the language earlier to help them. They must be very confused and lonely.
Just as with the other languages, I am learning this one to read, like a nerd; I find Greek philosophy and Hellenic paganism interesting. Finally, I just want another language with an alphabet my compatriots cannot put in Google Translate, so I can use it to write whatever I’d like.
It’s quite unlike other Indo-European languages in terms of grammar and vocabulary; depending on your personality, this will be very fun or very painful (the former for me.) A few things annoy me, though -- there are several dialects and periods of Greek that are quite different, meaning you’ll have to study several kinds to read all Greek literature. And there are very, very few Ancient Greek resources, fewer than Latin, which is a shame considering how much help one needs to learn it.
There isn’t much you can do with the language besides reading poems and plays. At least Latin was popular as a scientific language -- Greek’s only used for abstruse terms like “oligosaccharide.” If nothing else, it’s a cool party trick, I guess. It impresses people more than other dead languages like Sanskrit or Old Church Slavonic -- at least, where I live. I write Ancient Greek blessings and curses on my school’s whiteboards because it’s funny.
As a Vietnamese-American, I dine, shop, celebrate holidays, and generally hang out in places where people expect me to speak the language. It’s almost shameful when I cannot, and even more so that I can speak a bunch of Western languages better.
Its reputation as a brutal language with crazy orthography only makes me more excited, the same way the danger of Mount Everest only excites some people.
Page created April 13, 2024.